Freddie Wong Quotes

The Asian male has an interesting history as far as Western appropriation. At one point, we were completely sexless Chinamen building the railroads. Then, World War II came around, and it was like, Asian guys are coming after the white women. We became a menace for a second.

- Freddie Wong

The moment you've brought a toothbrush to work, then you're getting into crunch time.

- Freddie Wong

We want to be a studio that makes a whole bunch of stuff we believe in, in all ranges of scale and time and length, and own as much as that IP ourselves and generate as much of that IP ourselves as possible.

- Freddie Wong

We were looking for representation that was creatively and commercially in synch with our core DNA. The team at WME understands where we're going, and we're looking forward to taking our company to the next level with them by our side.

- Freddie Wong

The goal is not to just do 'Video Game High School' every year. We want to grow into a real content production company. We want to be Pixar or HBO. We want to make five series a year or 10 series a year.

- Freddie Wong

Thanks to Netflix and Hulu, people are getting more and more used to consuming longer stretches of content on their televisions or computer screens.

- Freddie Wong

We firmly believe the future of television is online, and Hulu has recognized the value of quality long-form series.

- Freddie Wong

Hulu understood how much content costs. By remaining defensive, YouTube is losing various aspects of video - long-form, for example - to other companies.

- Freddie Wong

I feel like we cheated... because you read about these other directors, just like, 'Damn! They paid dues for 10 years before they got to get behind the camera.' We cheated because technology was in the right place at the right time, and we were alive at the right age at the right time for us to take advantage of that.

- Freddie Wong

There's a lot of history here. In terms of Asians in this country, you have a big influx after the Cultural Revolution, a big influx after the Korean War, a big influx after the Vietnam War.

- Freddie Wong

Content financing is a difficult beast no matter what era of Hollywood we're talking about.

- Freddie Wong

The Lionsgate deal came at an opportune time. It allows us to get our projects financed and create long-form content without needing to be reliant on brand deals or crowdsourcing for external financing.

- Freddie Wong

You have to figure out some way of making money without relying on video ads or people paying to download.

- Freddie Wong

Everyone talks about, 'Get your foot in the door,' but I never understood that mentality. Why would I want to go in that house? Why not build my own house? Why not take a chair and smash a window?

- Freddie Wong

Venture capitalists don't pay attention to you unless you have an app or a widget.

- Freddie Wong

YouTube is the place where people go to consume advertisements willingly. It's some capitalist dystopian nightmare.

- Freddie Wong

Defying genre conventions is instantly a risky move.

- Freddie Wong

One of our goals is to figure out ways of diversifying where we are.

- Freddie Wong

Gamer humor ranges all over the place. What it comes down to is taking a lot of what we see in gaming and we're familiar with in gaming and being like, 'OK, hold on, let's re-examine this for a second. Isn't this funny? Isn't this strange? Isn't this a little bit ridiculous?' That's where it is.

- Freddie Wong

The consumer is the absolute king in everything you do.

- Freddie Wong

Kickstarter has shifted from funding creative projects to funding products and videogames; the biggest funded are consumer electronics and video game projects.

- Freddie Wong

YouTube's a funny place because so many creators fall into their aesthetics out of necessity and the visuals are driven out of an urge to create. You get a lot of interesting examples of interesting design choices that have roots in practicality as well as an artistic sentiment.

- Freddie Wong

I think some people have a vague idea, but the general public has no clue what the actual behind-the-scenes of filmmaking is and what this profession is.

- Freddie Wong

If it doesn't feel organic to the audience, you gotta trust your gut.

- Freddie Wong

We are video consumers first and foremost, and we hate anything appearing in the videos that isn't organic.

- Freddie Wong

I think if you make good, interesting content with compelling story lines and good characters, people will tune into the web for as long as you want them to.

- Freddie Wong

Youku Tudou gives us the reach into China that we've been looking for, and we look forward to sharing even more content with international audiences in the near future.

- Freddie Wong

We're able to push the envelope with what we're doing, both on a technical and artistic level, which is the most that any filmmaker can ask for.

- Freddie Wong

When we started doing YouTube, the goal was, hey, let's make stuff that we want to see, that entertains us.

- Freddie Wong

I get occasional tweets from people asking what shampoo and conditioner I use. I go straight for the Costco brand, Kirkland brand, the bulk shampoo. That's as far as I go.

- Freddie Wong

A user who essentially costs YouTube money has very little say. The way to have a say is to concretely support the creators and channels you watch directly by giving them money.

- Freddie Wong

Views online is a real weird and sticky subject. One view on a 30-second piece of content is not equivalent to one view on a 30 minute video. In my mind it's not quite the same thing.

- Freddie Wong

People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.

- Freddie Wong

Drift racing is expensive.

- Freddie Wong

At the end of the day, we still make the things that we make. And we found that the best strategy in this very fluid marketplace is to not be tied into any given platform, but to be able to make good content, and good content will be able to live anywhere.

- Freddie Wong

When we think about a great movie, I mean, what do we think about? We think about story, we think about character. And when the visual effects aren't perfect, we forgive it.

- Freddie Wong

Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.

- Freddie Wong

I want to see more people push what it means to be a web show... because it's very difficult to make a living making those types of shows.

- Freddie Wong

When you have a home and create a brand people believe in and want to support, it makes it easier for you to control merchandise and sell it.

- Freddie Wong

Shooting on location and dressing locations in Los Angeles is shockingly expensive, especially when you're talking about webseries-level budgets, so the opportunity to build our sets in YouTube's space gives us a lot more room in our budget in being able to create the world of 'VGHS' properly.

- Freddie Wong

Visual effects have always been a part of this art form. And CG is simply a tool on the filmmaker's tool belt to tell a story, but when the end result is bad - maybe it's not the tool's fault.

- Freddie Wong

I don't think any reasonable person would object to you, as the advertiser, having say in who and what you want to pair your ad with.

- Freddie Wong

In general, a lot of content creators find that their success is unable to support any sort of organization of scale. It's pretty difficult to support even three or four employees.

- Freddie Wong

Non-studio entities can experiment with storytelling that might be too niche... for a studio.

- Freddie Wong

I have to credit high school for allowing us to mess around with movie stuff at a time when it was a novelty. Experimenting with that and having a very good group of friends to work with made it a very easy decision that this seemed like something I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

- Freddie Wong

When we started out doing YouTube videos, I think we were very, very early on in terms of people doing a behind-the-scenes component.

- Freddie Wong

If you can't answer the question 'What is VR adding to that experience?' - and it should be more than just a gee-whiz thing - then that project shouldn't be in VR. You're not taking full advantage of your medium.

- Freddie Wong

A lot of people have difficulty wrapping their heads around what VR is good for. And the direction people go first is wrong. The wrong place is always: How can we do something we've done before, but on this?

- Freddie Wong

Hollywood is just a bunch of middlemen, people trying to facilitate content transfer between creators and viewers.

- Freddie Wong

We are not frou-frou creative types. We have done both sides of the business and are constantly asking ourselves, 'How are we going to pay for this?' But the criteria is that it must fit with our world.

- Freddie Wong

As you reach more people, there is a potential to make a living with what you are creating, and that's the goal.

- Freddie Wong

We have an audience, the ability to fund our own projects, own our own projects, the ability to display our projects unencumbered by any middlemen. That's the perfect scenario.

- Freddie Wong

People always ask us, 'When are you guys gonna do a movie? When are you gonna do a TV show?' And to me, that feels like such a step backwards from where are.

- Freddie Wong

It's hard to sell merchandise off YouTube.

- Freddie Wong

Online is another way for all of us to reach people.

- Freddie Wong

Deep engagement is much more powerful and valuable than fleeting mass market engagement.

- Freddie Wong

A vlog look is a very specific look, and it's basically a phone look.

- Freddie Wong

It's rare to find a corporate partner who encourages true creativity, but our meetings with Lionsgate's creative team convinced us that this is the right move for RocketJump and our millions of fans.

- Freddie Wong

We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?

- Freddie Wong

While it's easy to sit back and cherry pick bad visual effects and blame the industry for making movies the way they are, you're really not seeing the whole picture.

- Freddie Wong

We believe that the future for content-creators such as ourselves lies in being able to source project money from an audience and deliver on those projects in a timely and cost-effective manner.

- Freddie Wong

I'm not even very good at most video games.

- Freddie Wong

From a creative perspective, we've been very fortunate in that doing it the 'VGHS' way gave us unlimited freedom. Whatever we wanted to do, however we wanted to do it, we had that.

- Freddie Wong

We founded RocketJump for two reasons: to provide quality entertainment and to reach as many different audiences as possible.

- Freddie Wong

We take a lot of pictures with fans, and when they walk away, their parents say, 'Who was that?'

- Freddie Wong

We've always wanted to control the video player for our videos. We really want to evolve how comments on videos work.

- Freddie Wong

Great visual effects serve story and character and in doing so, are, by their very definition, invisible.

- Freddie Wong

A better quality of video is better for everyone.

- Freddie Wong

Video content yearns to be free.

- Freddie Wong

Straight-up digital delivery will be the way the future works.

- Freddie Wong

On the advertising side, view count is not the most important thing. It's engagement.

- Freddie Wong

VR has a whole range of things it's very good at, and there's a lot of things that it's going to be deficient at.

- Freddie Wong

We don't believe in competition.

- Freddie Wong

Five years is a very long time. If you think about it in terms of just people's lives, in terms of who our audience is: if you were in high school when you first saw our stuff, you're in college now.

- Freddie Wong

We have full creative control, we have a giant audience that loves what we do, and we can make whatever we want.

- Freddie Wong